Research Associate

Pedro Paranaguá, Duke University and Fundação Getulio Vargas School of Law in Rio de Janeiro

Mr. Paranaguá, a Brazilian national, is a PhD candidate at the Duke University (SJD), and a professor of Law at Fundação Getulio Vargas School of Law in Rio de Janeiro (FGV-Rio), where he teaches at the graduate and post-graduate Schools and coordinates the distance learning law courses at FGV-Online. He is also a consultant to the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and visiting professor at Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ); State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ); Candido Mendes University (UCAM), and at the Sao Paulo Bar Association´s Superior School of Advocacy (ESA-OAB/SP). In addition to his teaching responsibilities, he coordinates FGV’s Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme (www.a2kbrasil.org.br), which has partnerships with the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, and IDEC, the largest Brazilian consumers group. He also represents FGV-Rio at the World Intellectual Property Organization and serves as Project Leader at the Centre for Technology and Society of FGV-Rio.

His current research focuses on: intellectual property (IP) and sustainable development; the relationship between new technologies and IP; new business and licensing models, such as Creative Commons, GNU/GPL free software licenses; the influence of private-interest and public-interest NGOs on IP policy-making; international IP policy-making within the WTO/TRIPs Agreement and UN’s WIPO; political history, justification and objectives of IP rights; IP and consumer rights; patents and access to medicines, and access to knowledge in general.

Prior to joining academia, Mr. Paranaguá led, for one year, an intellectual property study group at a Brazilian NGO, focusing on patents and access to medicines and worked closely with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and with the Brazilian Ministry of Health. Prior to that, he had worked for three years at the intellectual property law firm Gusmao e Labrunie, in Sao Paulo.

He holds a Master of Laws (LL.M) degree in Intellectual Property from the University of London, Queen Mary where his dissertation was on “The Development Agenda for WIPO: another stillbirth? A battle between access to knowledge and enclosure”.